Clearwire Supports Net Neutrality? Does No One Remember Its History?

from the that's-funny... dept

How quickly people forget. With the FCC's announcement about support for net neutrality legislation the PR and lobbying machines of the major telco and cable providers have cranked up, putting out all sorts of fear mongering letters and reports about the damage such a law will do. There was one interesting exception. Some noticed that wireless broadband provider Clearwire appeared to support the FCC's position (though, I'd argue that the statement's wording is a bit vague). While the article at Moconews suggests this "isn't surprising," I'm wondering how everyone seems to have forgotten that Clearwire, in the past, was one of the most aggressive broadband providers to support a non neutral network. A few years back, it was blocking VoIP and streaming media and proudly promised to block any type of traffic or application it didn't like. It also tried to get VoIP providers to get "certified" before promising they could work on Clearwire's network. Of course, plenty can change in a few years, but it's quite noteworthy that Clearwire may have changed its tune on net neutrality entirely.

Government regulation

>>What I do have a problem is when government start to legislate specifics. That would be bad.

In a free market system I would agree. However, the broadband market in the US is much more of an oligopoly and even a full monopoly in many areas. More government regulation is required the further you move from a free market system, which is one of many reasons that oligopoly and monopolies are bad.

If we had real competition in the broadband market we would not even be discussing net neutrality.

Re: A Tale of Two Networks

...And when you have that 4G OFDM network advantage, but your much bigger (VZW, ATT) competition needs to cram all their data through a 3G pipe that is bursting at the joints...well, then you'd be even more in favor of net neutrality. It plays into your competitive advantage.

WiMAX is open

WiMAX in general is designed to be open in the first place; but Clear isn't completely telling the truth here. They block many ports on their WiMAX network including inbound port 80 and 25 (maybe outbound as well).

Blocking ports

Some port blocking makes good sense. Port 25 is one of those "security" issues as would most inbound traffic.

The FCC said appropriate network management is allowed but it should be open and documented and most importantly defensible.

No one is selling server services. You get dynamic IP addresses...you should not expect to have server services running. There is no reason to have port 25 open as it is an insecure protocol used primarily by end users to send spam after their computers have been pwned.

Old vs. new Clearwire

Since I was the one who wrote those stories you linked to, perhaps nobody better than me to point out that Clearwire is a much different company now -- mainly one with boatloads more spectrum and more financial heft thanks to the merger with Sprint's WiMAX assets and the backing of Google, Comcast, etc. Google especially is an important partner when it comes to net neutrality -- no doubt Goog's $500 million came with some pointed observations that it wouldn't do to have Google invest in a service provider who still thought blocking VoIP was a good idea. If you're looking for when Clearwire turned its net neutrality ship around, that would have been the when.